“I am not interested in why man commits evil; I want to know why he does good.”
— Vaclav Havel
What makes a poor, small-town journalist stay on a story even though threatened with certain death, and offered handsome rewards for looking the other way?
Over four years, Terry Gould has travelled to Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq – the countries in which journalists are most likely to be murdered on the job – to attempt to answer this question. In each place, through conversations with their colleagues, their families and in some cases their murderers, he uncovers the lives of local reporters and broadcasters who stayed on a story to the point of death. He searches for the moment in which each of his protagonists understood that they were willing to die, and finds complex reasons for their bravery. In his wonderfully vivid portraits of seven courageous souls, he brings their lives and the stories they worked on to light, telling truth to those who would murder truth tellers.